Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red (12 page)

It was a middleaged man with a square face capped by thick black hair, he wore eyeglasses with heavy frames of black plastic, above which black eyebrows all but met at the bridge of the nose. In the lapel of his dark gray suit there was a Kiwanis button, the man smiled and looked at his watch, a small square of gold much too delicate for his thick, hairy wrist. “We should be rolling pretty soon,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Apparently the man was determined to make conversation. “I went into the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, but Lord! the service is so slow. I decided to pass it up. I didn’t want to miss the bus.”

“It is kind of slow sometimes.”

“I like to travel by bus.” the other went on. “Get a chance to see the countryside.”

“You won’t see much this trip,” said Ekko. “Not at night.”

“No. I suppose not, but even so. I like it a lot better than going by plane. You traveling all the way to Albany?”

“If I don’t decide to get off before.”

The man raised his black eyebrows. “You mean you don’t know where you’re going? You just came for the ride?”

Ekko shrugged. “I felt like taking a ride on a bus. This bus was scheduled to go, so I bought a ticket and got on board.”

The other laughed a deep bass gurgle of a laugh. “What’s so funny?”

“You young people…. You’re wonderful! You felt like taking a ride on a bus, so you…” He could not stop chuckling. “Tell me, why a bus?”

Ekko grinned, he warmed to this open admiration, the man was such a complete square, a regular nine-to-fiver, probably with a fat wife and an acne-faced teenaged daughter they were worried might go too far with some boy, he expanded. “It’s like this: you’re walking along the street” – he remembered his duffle bag in the rack above – “say; like you’re taking laundry to the laundromat and you decide you’re fed up. You suddenly get the idea you can’t stand the rat race. Understand?”

The man nodded.

“So you just like decide you want a little change.”

“I get it, and because you happened to be in Park Square, you took a bus.”

“That’s right.” said Ekko grinning.

“And if you happened to be down by South Station, you’d take a train? Or in East Boston, a plane?”

Ekko looked at him suspiciously; but his face was bland and guileless, he shook his head. “Naw. I don’t care much for trains or planes, but I like to ride on buses, especially at night. On a bus it’s dark at night, they turn the lights off so the driver can see the road. Things can happen in the dark.”

“What kinds of things?”

Ekko looked at the square. “Oh, all kinds of things.”

“Like what?”

His eagerness was pathetic. “Well, like take the time I took the eleven o’clock out of New York for Boston. I got the window seat like now, and next thing you know this chick comes aboard and sits down beside me, well, I was dead on my feet, hadn’t slept for days. You know how it is in the big city.”

“Sure do.”

Ekko smiled to himself. “I look around and see there were plenty of other seats, so I figure she wants company. You could see she was a high-class chick and goodlooking, she’s wearing one of those coats that comes down to the ankles and when she takes it off. I see she’s really built. So when she sits down. I say something like. ‘It’s a nice night for it.’ You know, to get friendly and start the ball rolling. But she just says ‘M-hm,’ and she opens this book of poetry and starts reading. So I says to myself, ‘Okay, lady; if that’s the way you want it.’ and I close my eyes for a little shut-eye, then in a couple of minutes the lights go off and we start rolling and I fall asleep. But you know how it is on a bus, you don’t really sleep. You just like doze off and on.”

“Sure. I never really can sleep on a bus.”

“So once when I wake up, the broad is fast asleep with her head back on the cushion and her mouth open a little, and this little wisp of hair is across her face and every time she breathes out she like blows it away and then it falls back. So I twist around to kind of watch it and I fall asleep, watching, and then I feel something touching me and I kind of half wake up and it’s the chick, she’s curled up facing me and she’s touching me in her sleep. Right where it counts.”

The square was now excited. “So what did you do?”

“Well, I hitched up closer to her and I got this long coat she had on her lap to kind of cover us.”

“And then?”

“What do you think? I put my hand on her boobs, and when she didn’t wake up I like hitched closer and put my other hand up her dress.”

“And then what did you do?”

“What could I do? We were in a bus. I couldn’t try to put it to her right then and there, we just held each other like that and I fell asleep that way.”

“And in the morning?” The guy was dying.

Ekko grinned. “Nothing. When I woke up, we were just pulling in to Boston and she was gone, she must’ve got off at Newton, anyway, that’s why I like to take a bus ride every now and then.”

“So nothing happened?” the man said regretfully. “You never saw her again?”

“Naw.”

“I think maybe you dreamt it.”

Ekko grinned in the darkness. Let him suffer. “No; I didn’t dream it.”

The other sat silent and made no further comment, after a while Ekko dozed off. It seemed only minutes later that he was awakened by the bus driver announcing that they’d be arriving in Springfield in ten minutes, the man removed a small overnight bag from the rack overhead, and then sat down again holding it on his lap.

“Springfield,” the man said. “That’s where I get off.”

“Oh; Springfield already?”

“Uh-huh. You know, you had me going for a minute,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, all that about taking a bus ride just because you felt like it and not knowing where you’re planning to get off.” He chuckled. “You young people are always trying to let on that you do whatever you like, just the wav you feel, but it’s only a lot of talk. You go someplace because that’s the place you want to go, just like anybody else. You’re on this bus right now because you were planning to get on this bus.”

Ekko tensed up. “How do you know?”

The man laughed his deep gurgle. “Because I saw you. I saw you get on the train at Charles Street. I was right behind you, and I saw you. You were carrying a canvas dufflebag and it’s up there on the rack, and I saw you get out at Boylston and head right for the bus station. No strolling along the street and suddenly deciding to take a bus ride on the chance that some girl might sit down beside you so that you could feel her up.”

“Were you following me?”

“No: but I was right behind you, then when we got to the bus station, I went into the cafeteria, and you went to the ticket booth.”

“Must’ve been some other guy,” Ekko muttered.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t. It was you. I noticed you particularly, because I could see you was wearing a wig, and that moustache is phony, too. I could spot it in a minute on account I’m a barber and hair’s my business. You bald or something?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty naked there,” he said sheepishly.

The bus came to a halt and the man rose. “You get head colds all the time, do you?”

“Naw, it’s just that the chicks don’t go for baldies.”

The man laughed. “Well, there’s passengers always get on here, maybe you’ll have better luck the rest of the way.” He waved genially and headed down the aisle.

Like all district attorneys. Matthew Rogers of Suffolk County., which included all of Boston, was first and foremost a politician and only secondly., and it was a poor second, a lawyer. Rogers was tall, strikingly handsome, and one of the youngest men ever to hold the office, the party bosses foresaw a bright future for him: certainly attorney general of the state, then, who knows? possibly even governor, although of good Irish Catholic stock, he did not look it; and his name – neither name – was flagrantly Irish, so it was easier for the other ethnic groups to accept him.

Shortly after finishing law school – and he had gone to Harvard Law rather than to Catholic Boston College – Rogers’ father-in-law, who was in politics, told him that he had sounded out “the boys” and they were willing to back him for political office. “With the boys backing you, Matt, you’re practically a shoo-in for the state legislature.”

“I was thinking of running for school committee.” said Matthew Rogers.

“That’s crazy. Matt. It don’t pay nothing. You’ve got to think of Kathleen and the girls, and for school committee you got to run city-wide.”

“But in the legislature I’d be only one of a couple of hundred, and on the school committee I’m one of five, and I’m not worried about the pay, with the millions the school committee dispenses every year. I ought to be able to pick up enough law business to more than equal what I’d be getting in the state legislature.”

Matthew Rogers ran as a family man, as the concerned father of children who attended the public schools; all his campaign posters and cards showed him seated, with his lovely wife standing beside him, and their two pretty little daughters sitting at their feet, he won handily.

On the school committee he had espoused the cause of the teachers. His father-in-law remonstrated. “Why do you want to get tied in with a pay raise for teachers? It’s going to mean a jump in the tax rate. Matt, and you won’t get a damn thing out of it, the teachers ain’t like the cops or the firemen, they’re a bunch of rabbits, they got no clout, they won’t go to bat for you come election time, they’ll vote for you, but you won’t get those snooty bastards going around ringing doorbells.”

“But they’ve got better contacts with the media.” said Matthew Rogers.

The pay raise was compromised, but he was now the one liberal on the committee, and when reporters and TV newscasters covered a meeting of the school committee, he was the one they usually interviewed.

After a couple of terms on the school committee, he had run for district attorney of the county, again projecting the family-man image in his campaign, with the slogan “Vote for Matt Rogers and make Suffolk County a decent place to bring up your family.” This time his campaign pictures showed him seated beside his now somewhat more matronly wife, with the two older girls, quite the young ladies, standing on either side of their parents, a third sitting on the floor, and a fourth on her mother’s lap, again he won handily.

He had taken office just as the student riots were beginning. When trouble broke out in Hollings College, he had seized the opportunity to demonstrate his capacity for leadership – against the advice of his chief assistant, the senior assistant district attorney, Bradford Ames.

“Don’t do it, Matt,” Ames told him. “These aren’t hoods, they’re college kids from nice families, some of them with a lot of political influence, and you’ll find when you go into court that the college authorities won’t back you up. Keep out of the line of fire and let the cops handle it, or you’ll get clobbered.”

Rogers had stared at him, uncomprehending. “They’ve taken possession of one of the buildings, haven’t they? They’ve destroyed buildings. Do you expect me to stand by idly while private property is seized? It is private property, isn’t it?”

Bradford Ames was in his fifties, quite a bit older than his chief, he came from an old and wealthy Boston family and had no difficulty wangling an appointment as assistant district attorney immediately after passing the bar exam, a bachelor, he found his niche in the district attorney’s office, where he was content to remain, although of medium height, he looked short because he was well-fleshed. His suit, though tailor-made and expensive, looked rumpled and ill-fitting because, sitting or standing, he slouched, he wore old-fashioned stiff detached collars, which appeared too tight for him and tended to make his head look bigger than it was, he was a smiley, chuckling, Dutch uncle of a man, so that when on occasion his face became stem and grave, as it did sometimes when addressing a jury; everyone in the courtroom felt that a horrendous crime indeed had been committed, he knew intimately all the clerks, criminal lawyers, and judges, knew their special characteristics and idiosyncrasies, but he also had an instinctive feeling for political considerations and he had been invaluable to a succession of district attorneys, unobtrusively training them in their jobs.

He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot under Rogers’ stare and then emitted an embarrassed chuckle. “Well, it is and it isn’t private property, a college is actually a community of scholars that developed into a corporation with trustees and officers who appoint the president. In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, a lot of colleges were set up by the students, they hired the faculty and fined them when they were late for their lectures. What I’m saying is that it could be argued that the college belongs to the students as much as it does to the administration.”

But Rogers had persisted – and he had indeed got clobbered. For a few days he’d had a fine time, issuing statements to the press, getting photographed, conferring with the college president and the dean, planning strategy with the police. It had resulted finally in a heated confrontation between police and students with physical injuries sustained on both sides, and suddenly; he was the villain, target of dozens of denunciatory letters in the press and even an editorial or two, he discovered, to his surprise, that many of the faculty sided with the students and that even the administration was having second thoughts. To his great disgust, when the case of the ring leaders finally came to trial, the administration showed great reluctance to prosecute, and even the judge, who imposed a small fine, suggested in his summation that perhaps the authorities had overreacted.

Rogers was a politician and he learned his lesson. From then on, whenever there was student unrest, he followed the advice of his chief assistant, ames, and let the police take the lead. When it was absolutely necessary for his office to appear, he assigned the case to the most junior member, some youngster fresh out of law school, and Ames would brief him. “Keep a low profile, and don’t push. Remember, you’re just going along for the ride, the chief considers this basically intramural, something for the college to work out, and doesn’t want to get involved.”